Bill's book is now available in the UK. An extract and a review appear today in the Sunday Times, and the book can be ordered via the newspaer. Details below.From The Sunday Times
April 19, 2009
Satanic Majesties at warAs a fanzine editor, Bill German had a unique insight into the lives of the Rolling Stones – it wasn’t pretty
I rang the doorbell at high noon. A guy on the intercom told me to look in the camera and identify myself. He buzzed me in and said, “Mick and Jerry are out shopping but you can wait in the kitchen.”
It was September 28, 1983, the day after my 21st birthday, and I’d been summoned to 304 West 81st Street, Mick Jagger’s New York home.
Since I was 16 I’d been running a Rolling Stones newsletter, Beggars Banquet. I’d been getting to know the band a bit but an interview with Mick was unprecedented for me. A few hours later I was also scheduled to meet Keith Richards.
Meeting them both that day – and many times since – gave me an insight into rock’n’roll’s strangest couple. They’re now in their sixties but even back then both Mick and Keith (but above all Keith) were not what they seemed.
When he finally arrived home, Mick shook my hand, apologised for being late and introduced his girlfriend: “Jerry, you know Bill, right? From Beggars Banquet?”
“Oh, yes, I enjoy reading that,” she replied. She was charming, tall and, contrary to the famous line in Andy Warhol’s diary, completely devoid of body odour.
Mick’s study was on the top floor. It was very neat and dappled with sunshine. The windows were open and I could hear the shrieks of young girls. You’d think there’d be a law against it but Mick Jagger was living next to an all-girl middle school.
The Jagger charm was at work that day. He gave me a preview of the Stones’ new album, dancing and prancing around the room. He went down on all fours to mop up my orange juice after I spilt it on his 16th-century Persian rug. And he gave me a peek into the mundane tensions of life at home for a super-model and a rock star: neither will answer the telephone.
Mick assumed Jerry would pick it up when it rang and grew annoyed when she didn’t. Eventually he grabbed it himself.
“Halloooo,” he said. “Who eeez calleeeeng . . . Oh, yeah, hang on, I think she’s downstairs.”
He walked to the staircase and shouted: “Jerry! It’s for you! Pick up next time! We can’t get any work done if the phone keeps ringing!”
A few hours after this businesslike encounter I was with Keith Richards in the Rolling Stones Records office. A cigarette was dangling from his lips and an unplugged Fender guitar was resting on his lap. He wore a scarf around his neck and had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, which he offered me. I stuck with ginger ale but couldn’t open the can.
“Not a problem,” said Keith. He whipped a huge knife out of his back pocket, pulled open the blade and stabbed the top of the can for me. “Now you got it.”
He made me feel so comfortable that I asked him how his heroin addiction affected the band – not the kind of question mainstream journalists threw at him.
“Hey,” he acknowledged, “for 10 years, or at least for five years undoubtedly, I was the weak link in the chain. From my point of view, no way. But I was, in retrospect, in no condition to judge. That’s the horrible, terrible fascination of dope. That when you’re on it, everything’s cool. And the more you take it, the more cool it is and the more necessary it is to be cool. It’s only in retrospect that you’re able to say: ah, this boy, you been led astray.
“When all is said and done, I’m either damned lucky or, as I like to kid myself, real smart, that I didn’t manage to top myself in that period. After all, the only thing I was topping the charts in then was the one most likely to kick the bucket. And I held that position for several years. It’s one of my minor joys that I’m no longer on the list. Sid Vicious beat me to it. Loads of others. That shows how wrong the charts can be.”
So there they were: the cool, helpful Mick Jagger and the weird, death-cheating Keith Richards. Right? Wrong.
“Brenda” was the codename that other members of the band used for Mick and it wasn’t a term of endearment. It was Keith who came up with it, after stumbling onto a book by an author named Brenda Jagger. As he was ready to stab Mick in the eyeballs, referring to his prima donna lead singer as Brenda was a healthier way to vent.
As I got to know the Stones better, I asked Ronnie Wood, the other guitarist, if Mick was really as bad as he and Keith made him out to be. “Well,” Woody sighed, “he has his moments, you know. The thing that me and Keith always say is that Mick Jagger is a nice bunch of guys.
“It all depends which one you get. He changes his accent every time you speak to him and he can turn you on or turn you off on any given day. You never know which Mick you’re going to get.”
I met a darker Jagger late one night in the basement studio of Woody’s house. One minute Mick was friendly, but as soon as we were alone he got in my face. And when I say “in my face”, I mean he got within two or three inches of my nose. Then he ripped into me: “I don’t like what you wrote! It’s not true! I don’t like it!” I’d written in Beggars Banquet that he hadn’t wanted to appear in the famous first Live Aid concert, which had just been broadcast world-wide, but had given in to emotional blackmail. I gulped and said: “Um, well, waddaya mean?”
“You know what you wrote! The bit about emotional blackmail! It’s not true! That’s not why I did it! Was no emotional blackmail!”
I began to stutter. “Um, well, th-that’s what I heard, so I . . . ”
“Well, it’s not true! Was no emotional blackmail, not at all! How dare you!”
Mick was so close to my face, I thought he was going to bite my cheek off. I guess he does that to intimidate people, and I’ve got to admit it worked. I was an insignificant boy from Brooklyn and I had one of the most famous people in the world ripping into me.
My only hope was that it was “coke rap”. He and Woody had been dabbling in the powder all night. In fact, while Mick was up close, I could spot the white rings around his nostrils.
At Christmas a few weeks later the florist brought me beautiful poinsettias. The card said they were from Mick. I realise he may have had a hundred people on his list that year, but I was one of them. Mick Jagger, that nice bunch of guys, was my pal again.
Another Jagger was on show when the band convened in Amster-dam to discuss their future: were they going to carry on or break up because of Mick’s pursuit of a solo career? They picked Holland because that’s where their holding companies were. It was basically a shareholders’ meeting.
At some point in the proceedings, Mick referred to Charlie Watts as “my drummer”. Something like: “None of this should matter to you because you’re only my drummer.”
Mick might’ve been joking, but it didn’t sit well with Charlie. He kept it bottled inside until he got back to his hotel room. He then clicked off his TV, put on his shoes, walked down the hall and knocked on Mick’s door. When the lead singer of the Rolling Stones opened it, his drummer clocked him on the jaw. Charlie then turned around and calmly walked away.
Keith saw Charlie in the hallway and asked him where he was coming from. The laconic Charlie answered, “I’ve just punched Mick Jagger in the face” – and kept walking.
Charlie had his own turmoil to contend with. He was soon in the midst of a nervous breakdown. His wife, Shirley, was going through a much-publicised booze problem and his teenage daughter, Seraphina, got tossed out of school for pot possession. Charlie didn’t need this crap and one of his outlets was his drumkit. His other was heroin.
He was always the “clean” Stone but the stresses in his life became too much to bear. If his favourite jazz musicians could shoot up, why couldn’t he?
In 1985, then, the Stones had a lead singer who didn’t want to be there, a drummer whose heroin addiction rivalled Billie Holiday’s and a guitarist who wanted to slit his lead singer’s throat.
The paradox was that throughout all this turmoil Keith, the drug survivor, was an extremely grounded man with an admirable domestic life – as I realised when I went for Christmas to the house in Connec-ticut that he shared with his wife Patti, a former model, and their two young daughters.
The basement had a fully stocked bar and a jumbo video screen. But at the basement’s far end was a class-room, complete with a blackboard, erasers and kiddie chairs.
On the bulletin board were their drawings of “daddy”, a stick figure with a stick guitar. Alexandra, 5, and Theodora, 6, were the primary reasons the Richardses had moved from Manhattan to the countryside. Rather than be separated from them, Keith took his family on the road and brought them to the band’s spectacular shows.
The domesticated Stones were far from the tearaways and hotel-wreckers of the mid1970s. On the first night of their Steel Wheels tour in 1989, the room registered to “Mr Simon Templar”, aka Ronnie Wood, was littered with sweet wrappers, confetti and Sesame Street balloons. The groupies and syringes were noticeably absent, replaced by Barbie dolls and toy aeroplanes.
The biggest surprise for me was that Mick was using a teleprompter. It wasn’t like the latterday Sinatra, who needed one to remember his lyrics; it was more like stage direction: “Brown Sugar: Mick left ramp, Ronnie right”; “Tumbling Dice: Take off green jacket”. And, “Hey, New York, how ya feelin’?”
Keith was complaining about the tour’s demanding pace: “When I was 20 years old, a rock’n’roll show was 20 minutes long. I’m 45 years old now and it’s not 45 minutes long. It’s 2½ hours.”
Another 20 years on, however, they are still at it. I don’t see why they can’t go on for ever.
© Bill German 2009
Extracted from Under Their Thumb by Bill German, published by Aurum Press at £14.99. Copies can be ordered for £13.49, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0845 271 2135 Sympathy for the devils, Books, Culture, pages 38-39 Under Their Thumb: How a Nice Boy from Brooklyn Got Mixed up with the Rolling Stones (and Lived to Tell the Tale) by Bill German
(Henry Diltz)
The Sunday Times review by Robert Sandall
This unassuming but highly readable memoir portrays the Rolling Stones over a period that has never much appealed to rock’s literati. When Bill German began producing his fan’s newsletter, Beggars Banquet, in 1978 while he was still at high school in Brooklyn, the Stones’ death-and-glory years were over. The big career-defining moments — Brian Jones’s drowning, the infamous concert at Altamont, the Exile on Main Street album and the orgiastic American tour that followed it — had all happened and been written up.
To German’s teenage peers the Stones were yesterday’s news, eclipsed by Pink Floyd and Saturday Night Fever. But still hypnotised by his idols’ “sexuality, sarcasm and rebelliousness”, German gives up his education “to interact with the Stones directly”. He spends the next 17 years following them around the world, usually at his own expense, issuing monthly updates on their exploits to Beggars Banquet’s 3,000 subscribers. This was never supposed to turn into a day job. “How could I have known in 1978 that the Stones were in the early stages of their career?” he asks, reasonably.
His youthful enthusiasm soon helps him become a fringe member of the Stones’ entourage. As such, he falls in with a crowd largely populated by drug dealers or narcotic advisers. Prominent among them is “Svi” the Israeli Talmudic scholar who acts as Keith Richards’s “drug taster”, administers his $700-a-day drug budget and claims he helped him smuggle cocaine hidden inside his son Marlon’s GI dolls. German also chums up with the most entertaining supplier, Freddy Sessler, a sixtysomething Holocaust survivor, who specialises in snorting coke in public places. German notes that Sessler can do pretty much as he pleases around the Stones thanks to Richards’s everlasting gratitude to him for taking the rap for a drug bust in Arkansas in 1975. “Freddy,” German writes, “epitomised everything Mick despised about Keith.”
German is, to a degree, an innocent abroad. He blanks the sexual opportunities routinely offered in Stones circles. “I spent the prime of my virility licking more postage stamps than anything else,” he drily remarks, pointing out that many of the groupies are old-timers who have been around “since Brian Jones was a teenager”.
As a devout non-druggie, he arouses the hostility of the dealers swarming around Ronnie Wood, who suspect him of being an undercover cop. Wood, who in one memorable scene sits with German in the kitchen of his London home discussing their plans for a book while feeding a large rock of cocaine though his pepper grinder, protects him from the sharks. Others are not so kind. In Tokyo, a cocaine drought leads the Stones’ main dealer to organise a consignment to be mailed to German from America without asking his permission. For a man who earns a paltry $14,000 in 1992 for his pains, German takes this in remarkably good part.
Nothing deflects him from his journalistic task. Welcomed by Richards, befriended by Wood, tolerated by Mick Jagger and completely unrecognised by Charlie Watts, he battles to maintain editorial independence. After a brief and unhappy spell in 1981 as the band’s “official” newsletter, Beggars Banquet reverts to printing stories that management — often meaning Jagger — don’t like.
German is nearly attacked by Jagger after suggesting in print that he succumbed to emotional blackmail by appearing at Live Aid. Richards’s personal manager lectures him for revealing that Keith spends most of his time in Manhattan, while the American tax authorities believe him to be resident in Jamaica. Jagger’s infidelities are way out of bounds, and when a management flunky has a go at him for naming Jagger’s favourite restaurants, German retorts in style, “At least I don’t print what he tips.”
The reason why the cagey Jagger allows German anywhere near the band emerges when a call comes in from the actor Ben Stiller in 1994. Stiller and Brad Pitt have been asked to devise a film about Stones fans that will sell the band to the younger “Generation X” demographic, a particular obsession with the Peter Pan-like Jagger. German has been proposed as a consultant. “If he honestly wanted to depict his fans, he’d get 40-year-old stockbrokers and the real football moms, not you and Brad Pitt,” is German’s level response. The film idea is later dumped.
By the mid-1990s money is, German feels, the Stones’ overriding priority. Having patiently reported the personality clashes of the 1980s, when Jagger’s desire to launch a solo career almost broke up the band, he witnesses their transformation into a corporate cash cow after the 1989-90 world tour with mounting dismay. It depresses him “how many decisions about where and when to record or perform were determined not by artistic inspiration but by lawyers and accountants”. The steep rise in ticket prices for the Stones’ concerts — from $30 to $300 in a mere six years — irks him as much as the way Jagger now reads scripted jokes from a teleprompter.
The final straw comes when German attends a “secret” club show in Amsterdam that is being filmed. The “hotties” in front of the stage are, he discovers, hired models. “For every paid model on that dancefloor, a Stones fan was robbed of a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” he concludes, and gives it all up on the spot. That German’s love for the band’s music remains intact, despite their best efforts, is not the least wonder of this remarkable tale.
Under Their Thumb by Bill German
Aurum £14.99 pp368
Pages: 1 2
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